


The Unbearable Knowing

by the_arc5



Category: Sherlock (BBC)
Genre: Angst, Childhood, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-09
Updated: 2011-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-23 00:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_arc5/pseuds/the_arc5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock spends a lot of time with death, but not all deaths are the same.  A remix for <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/111421"><i>The Vast Perhaps</i></a> by <a href="http://moony.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://moony.livejournal.com/"><b>moony</b></a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unbearable Knowing

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Vast Perhaps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/111421) by [moony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moony/pseuds/moony). 



> Beta'ed by the lovely, patient, and gloriously intelligent [](http://amaberis.livejournal.com/profile)[**amaberis**](http://amaberis.livejournal.com/). Britpicked by the equally lovely, lightning-fast, and intimidatingly intelligent [](http://whochick.livejournal.com/profile)[**whochick**](http://whochick.livejournal.com/). I would never write anything without them.

_This is what age must learn about:  
The ABC of dying.  
The going, yet not going,  
The loving and leaving,  
And the unbearable knowing and knowing.  
\- E.B. White_

Sherlock Holmes is three years old when he sees his first dead body. The sparrow is laying in the grass, far away from trees or bushes, its feathers clumpy and bedraggled. Sherlock thinks about this and decides the cats must have brought it here, then got bored and forgotten it. He prods it with a stick, too fascinated to leave it alone and too scared to touch it with his fingers.

“That’s disgusting,” Mycroft says behind him. It is, and smells a bit, but Sherlock goes on prodding. “Come away from it.”

“Why?” Sherlock asks. It’s his favourite word, the one he uses when he doesn’t even know what he wants to know. He asks Mycroft most often, because Mycroft knows everything, and only sometimes rolls his eyes and tells Sherlock to shut up.

“It’s a dead sparrow, the cats found it, and it definitely is diseased. Do you want to be diseased?”

Sherlock considers this. He isn’t sure what being diseased would entail; he’s never been diseased before. “Yes.”

“No, you don’t, you’ll have to go to the doctor then,” Mycroft sighs.

Doctors, with their needles and lights and stupid pictures and stupider questions. Sherlock grimaces and decides against disease for the day. Mycroft makes him come indoors and wash his hands.

“Why did it die?” he asks Mycroft, hands dangling helplessly over the sink while Mycroft splashes water over them and all over Sherlock’s shirt in the process.

“I don’t know. It might have been old; it might have got ill; the cats might have killed it.”

“Bastet didn’t!” Sherlock replies indignantly.

“I didn’t see blood on the body, so probably not,” Mycroft accedes. Sherlock is offended on his cat’s behalf anyway, but forgets he is soon after.

“But why is it dead?” he asks. Mycroft puts him down and rubs his wet hands with a towel. They feel streaky when he’s finished; Sherlock pinches at his palms absentmindedly.

“I told you, I don’t know!” Mycroft snaps. Sherlock waits until the question sits in Mycroft’s brain for a minute.

“Things...die,” Mycroft says slowly. “The part that makes them real goes away. The body is still there, but dead things don’t move or breathe or eat, and they aren’t what they were. They’re corpses, and corpses are just what’s left over. That sparrow, it can’t be a sparrow anymore because the part of it that made it alive went away. Everything dies, eventually.”

Mycroft looks thoughtful. Sherlock feels confused, and a little frightened.

“Will you be a corpse?” he asks.

“Someday.”

Sherlock swallows. “Will I be a corpse?”

“Someday.”

Sherlock goes immediately to his thinking corner. He faces the wall and thinks very, very hard, trying to work this out. What would it be like, to not breathe anymore? What would it mean, if he couldn’t taste colours or ask questions or look at things anymore? He imagines being frozen. He imagines being empty, all his insides scooped out and not even air left. He imagines Mycroft on the lawn, looking twisted and broken and stiff, like the sparrow.

He runs to Mycroft’s bed and flings himself on his brother, panic thumping hard in his chest. Mycroft shoves him off before he sees Sherlock’s face, then shoves him the opposite direction, so Sherlock falls on the mattress between Mycroft and the wall. He sticks his thumb in his mouth.

“Stop that,” Mycroft grumbles, and Sherlock curls into him. Mycroft doesn’t push him off.

“We won’t die _yet_ ,” Mycroft says, and Sherlock closes his eyes. It’s the first time he’s thought about corpses, but it won’t be the last.

***

The first time Sherlock sees someone die, he’s stuck in the loud, raucous environment of a school sporting event. He hates sporting events, but he’s become a rather good swimmer after that incident last summer with the fourth form boys and the pond. The medals make Mummy happy and prove he’s better than everyone else, which is incentive enough.

It’s not his turn to swim, though, when the boy thrashes and then sinks in the water. There is screaming and lots of rushing people and Sherlock can’t get a good look at what happens next. He devours the reports in the papers, though, even going so far as to highlight the important bits. He writes notes to himself in the narrow margins and takes to pacing his bedroom.

The boy, Carl Powers, had died. They had blamed a sudden and severe cramp, so painful as to cause the boy to panic. He’d drowned before anyone could get to him. It was being spun as a terrible tragedy.

Sherlock spends an entire afternoon on the phone with anyone he could find numbers for: medical examiner, a series of policemen, thirty seconds with the detective on the case. They are all horrified and hang up on him, sometimes telling him angrily to stop reading so many cheap detective novels.

“But where are his _shoes_?” Sherlock would protest, and the conversation always ends there. Livid, Sherlock even takes the train to London to speak to someone in person. The best he can get is an annoyed-looking constable, clearly new on the job, who thinks talking to this kid is some sort of initiation prank. Sherlock tries to explain his theory of a murder, and the constable shakes his head.

“Look, kid,” he begins, and someone shouts, “Lestrade!” from a back office. Sherlock is clapped condescendingly on the shoulder.

“It’s nice you’re trying to look out for your friend, but it was an accident. I’m sorry.”

Sherlock opens his mouth to protest he didn’t even know Carl, but the man is gone. He seethes on the train ride home, vowing to himself that the next time he sees a murder, he’ll _make_ them listen.

Somehow, it doesn’t occur to him that most people don’t see many murders. Sherlock knows there will be a next time. And eventually, there is.

***

The first time Sherlock dies, he’s only dead for 2.8 seconds. He doesn’t mind. What he does mind is the wretched feeling of waking up, of knowing he was very, very close to sliding into darkness forever, and being brought back to the noise and the sound and the monotony by some doctor who only did his job. Mummy cries and calls him her sweet boy, who he has never been, and Mycroft glowers from the corner. When Mummy shuffles off to dry her eyes and find tea, Mycroft gives Sherlock the sharp edge of his tongue, a steady stream of quiet, unhurried words that cut like razors.

Sherlock hates him. Hates Mummy. Hates living, hates breathing, hates being stuck in a world that is too loud, too bright, too crowded, and too blank all at the same time. He doesn’t chase the high, exactly; he chases that illicit thrill of knowing that this dose might kill him, that any respectable member of society would recoil in righteous horror at what he puts in his veins, the pathetic-but-trying secrecy of obtaining the stuff. He’s a chemist, he could do it himself, but he craves the added danger of purchase or theft, of getting mixed up with unsuitable people.

Mycroft suddenly cuts his words off short, rage and exhaustion and panic and relief flickering across his face in quick succession.

“Do you want to die?”

The question is real, not rhetorical, and while _yes_ rises to Sherlock’s lips like bile, he doesn’t say it. He does want to die; he wants the chaos to stop, he wants his brain to stop rotting with the unbearable _sameness_ of it all. But he doesn’t want to die, either, not really. He’s special, and dying in a back alley like a common junkie would be a waste. Sherlock abhors waste. And there are days, sometimes limned with the exquisite, breathless edge of the drug and sometimes just the machinations of his brain, when he feels like he can breathe, and breathing isn’t such a terrible thing.

“I don’t know,” he answers, and Mycroft nods once. It’s more than he hoped for, Sherlock can tell.

“If you can stay clean for six months, I’ll put you in contact with Scotland Yard,” Mycroft says after a long silence. “They won’t want you, they’ll antagonize you constantly, and they probably won’t pay you. At least, they won’t want to. I’ll see to it that they do, because I’m tired of giving you an allowance. You will solve their problems for them, and they won’t give you any credit at all, except to give you more problems they don’t know how to solve. Of which, I regret to say, there is a fairly high number. But if there is the faintest suggestion of drug abuse during the six months or at any point thereafter, the contract will be terminated and I will not stand in the way of any legal action.”

Sherlock flinches involuntarily. The idea of being shut up in a grey box for any length of time really would drive him to suicide. This is a devil’s bargain, but Sherlock is tantalized by the thought of a supply of dead bodies and stories to unravel. Mycroft waits. He doesn’t ask if this will be enough, if Sherlock can get clean on his own, if the plan will stick. He’s never been one to insult Sherlock’s intelligence, after all.

“I’ll need a place to live,” Sherlock says at last. “No flatmates.”

The deal is sealed, and it’s a long time before Sherlock thinks about inducing his own death again.

***

The first time someone offers to die for Sherlock, his nerves string out to a high whine and the world narrows to a pinpoint focus. The pinpoint focus is centred on a bland, unassuming man who limps sometimes, worries about tea entirely too much, has the patience of a saint, and possesses the aim of an assassin. A man who has thrown his arms around the world’s most dangerous criminal and dared him to blow them all to kingdom come.

For a split second, it all makes sense. John is a soldier, and knows collateral damage is part of the war. John is kind, and would rather sacrifice three men than three hundred. John has been strapped to a bomb and is tired of this bullshit and is taking control the only way he can.

But the echoes of Sherlock’s name sound loud in the pool, and Jim giggles a bit and looks over at Sherlock’s forehead. Sherlock can almost feel the prick of the laser sights, and in that moment, it all stops making sense. John, the kind soldier with a need to take control and an acceptance of collateral damage, lets his arms fall and steps back, looking gutted. John didn’t want to save the world from a madman; he wanted to save Sherlock. More than that, he expected to die in the attempt and didn’t care.

When Sherlock’s knee hits the tile and his hands find the clasps of the vest, his entire body is trembling slightly. He feels sick, hot and cold by turns, and he’s horrified at his own reaction, his _need_ to know John is all right. He knows what dead bodies look like, but if that ordinary, extraordinary thing that made John himself were to fly away and never come back, there would be no help for him. It’s a sudden, crushing realization, to know that quiet, unobtrusive, easily astounded John has grown into him like an extra limb and that losing him would be more than unacceptable. It would be unsurvivable.

All of this comes second to the knowledge that John would, if he had to; John would die to make sure Sherlock lived.

He runs just far enough to see the corridor deserted and comes back, pacing and running the cool barrel of the gun over his face, trying to channel the pounding adrenaline into something that works. John says something, makes a joke that vaguely alludes to sex, and Sherlock’s thoughts coalesce into a single word, _fuck_. If it’s an order or a plea or a description or an invective born of fear, Sherlock doesn’t know.

He doesn’t have time to work it out before everything goes to hell.

***

It’s a couple of days before John comes home again, the bandages and cast unsettling white spots on his forehead and arm, like someone has spilled correction fluid over him. He showers, first thing, then settles on the sofa in worn pyjamas. Sherlock opens his laptop and shuts it, fusses with things in his bedroom, and contemplates the kettle without doing anything about it. He feels like he’s been rubbed down with sandpaper, and everything is raw and itching and stinging in the way that is torture to touch and torture to leave alone. John is breathing on their sofa, relaxed and normal and very John-ish, which very well may be the most incredible thing that has happened in the past week. That is, the past week happened, and there were explosions and near-drownings and the exchange in the rubble, angry and tender and bundled up with uncertainty. He’d touched John’s face and wondered, and John...

God. John had looked at him, soaking wet and coughing and shivering with shock, like Sherlock was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. Ludicrous, of course, because Sherlock had seen the real wonder and now hasn’t the first bloody clue of what to do with him.

“Takeaway tonight,” John says when Sherlock’s pacing sends him through the sitting room again. “I feel like I could sleep for a week, I’m not cooking.”

Food, sleep, _normality_ , bundled up in a shapeless oatmeal jumper on the sofa, looking placid and unruffled. Except all that peace and tranquillity will follow him into explosions and dark alleys, killing and dying for what he values, and somehow Sherlock is one of those things. Sherlock wants, and he doesn’t know how to finish off that sentence.

“Sherlock,” John says seriously, and Sherlock freezes mid-step. “It’ll be all right. You know that, don’t you? We’ll find him. We’ll catch him.”

There’s so much absolute conviction in John’s voice, for the first time in quite possibly his entire life, Sherlock worries about what it would mean to fail. Immediately, he tells himself he can’t; he won’t, for John’s sake. If this is what love feels like, like you’ve been hollowed out with not even air left, like the thing that makes you live has been taken outside you and has to be protected, then Sherlock doesn’t wonder that it makes people kill and steal and write song after song about it. He’s never wanted to kill anyone before, but if anyone tries to take John from him now, he can’t imagine letting them live. He wants to hide John under a blanket where only the two of them exist, he wants to show John how brilliant he can be, he wants to see John yank him back from the edge of oblivion, he wants John to never come so close to dying again.

It’s paralyzing. It’s horrible. It’s _wonderful_.

“We will,” Sherlock says like a vow. “Can I kiss you?”

John blinks at him, startled, then shrugs. “All right.”

Sherlock kisses John, tentatively at first. Kissing is ordinary, something normal people do all the time; kissing John Watson is so far from ordinary, Sherlock can’t even see it anymore. He jostles John’s cast, which makes John hiss a bit in displeasure, and draws back, opening his eyes.

“You really mean it, don’t you?” John asks, and Sherlock grimaces.

“Don’t be stupid, of course I do.”

John laughs, shaking his head, and kisses him again. Sherlock presses into him, discovering what it means to know what John _tastes_ like, what the inside of his mouth feels like, the firm, knowing pressure of one hand on his hip. He can feel John’s breath on his skin, hear John’s muffled little sound of approval. He braces one knee on the edge of the sofa and tips them, leaving him trapped awkwardly against the arm with John on top of him, their legs tangled together in a way that will only be comfortable as long as the kiss lasts.

For now, though, they keep kissing, and it feels like breathing, like being alive.


End file.
